Thai Thai offers the basic Thai fare in the Super Brand Mall in Pudong. The restaurant is a haven between shopping sprees. The food is good and cheap. The staff is very attentive and positive, some speak also English.

We ate two chicken curries and bowls of rice. The total cost was less than five euros. The only mishap was that one of the curries had chicken mostly in the name, we managed to find five small pieces from the broth. Anyhow, the price / quality ratio was much better than in the next door McDonald’s.

Thai Thai, Super Brand Mall, 168 Liujiazui Xilu, Shanghai, China

I and Sanna visited the annual Finnish travel fair ‘Matka’ yesterday in Helsinki’s Messukeskus. The huge fair centre was packed full with airlines, tour operators, country booths and other eager salespersons offering something related to travel and tourism. Half of the area was devoted to international travelling and the rest was a showcase for Finland.

During the first days, the fair is open only for professionals and then from Friday to Sunday, everybody is welcome to gather information and make great deals.

We got the tickets almost free from Blue1, subsidiary of SAS — saved the price of the ticket (€12 each) but had to give 100 points for each ticket. Not a bad deal.

The fair itself was quite similar to the previous years. SAS/Blue1 had a huge stand with full of competitions — hopefully we win a ticket or two in the forecoming draws. Finnair had also big stand, but it was somewhat apathetic, the buzz of SAS/Blue1 was totally missing.

There were some other airlines with good bargains, too. We avoided the tour operators and most of the country stands, as they don’t provide much added value to browsing the Internet.

Currently, we aren’t interested that much of travelling due to various reasons. The spring will be extremely busy, so I have to keep my itchy feet at the bay, and concentrate on getting things done.

We’re planning some short trips in Finland, so we spent surprisingly long time in the Finnish hall — usually we don’t pick any leaflets there, but now at least half of the papers were about Finland.

The fair was oddly mild experience this year. Maybe the disaster in Asia has changed the tone a little bit. Too bad, as tourism is one of the ways to get the local economies up and running again.

The city’s largest department store, Nextage in Pudong area, specialises in Chinese upscale brands. There are a few Western brands at the ground floor, but everything else is local. Don’t be fooled with European sounding names.

Most of the stuff is put poorly on the view, and the store has somewhat 70s feeling. Still, you can make some real good finds, especially if you are a compact person. Remember to check the quality of the goods. The numerous members of the sales staff are very attentive, but not very helpful due to language barrier.

Nextage, 501 Zhangyang Lu, Shanghai, China, +86 21 5830 1111

If you are located in Pudong, for example in Grand Hyatt or Intercontinental Pudong, you don’t have to cross the river to do some serious shopping. Super Brand Mall is the biggest lure on this side of the river, specialising mostly to Chinese and Asian brands.

The ground floor of the mall has the biggest shoe store that I’ve ever seen; Al Bundy would be green with envy. The goods are not always of top quality, but you can find also real bargains.

The mall contains also a cinema, fast food joints and several reasonably priced restaurants, located on the upper floors.

Super Brand Mall, 168 Liujiazui Xilu, Shanghai, China, +86 21 6887 78888

As promised almost a month ago, I have uploaded some photos from our recent trip to Shanghai and Singapore. The Far East gallery is in the photos section, in Travel galleries.

Unfortunately the photo system doesn’t have any commenting possibilities, so add any comments you might have here.

Shanghai Tang, David Tang’s East meets West fusion fashion concept store has landed Shanghai for a couple of years ago. There are several locations around the city, we visited the small boutique in Xintiandi.

The clothes and accessories combine Asian aesthetics with Western design and quality. Currently, these garments have also some curiosity value, as they aren’t found that easily from Europe or America.

The small shop contains a small selection of clothes and a good variety of scarfs. Pop over while you are going to eat in the Xintiandi restaurants, but remember to save some money for the restaurant bill.

Shanghai Tang, 15 Xintiandi North Block, Lane 181 Tai Cang Road, Shanghai, China, +86 21 6384 1601

Plaza 66 hosts the most exclusive brand boutiques found in Shanghai. You can empty your wallet, for example, in Prada, Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Bvlgari, Cartier, Chanel, Dior or Boss shop. And this was only the first floor, the list could be continued with lesser brands from the second and third floor.

The top-most floor have several furniture and interior shops, so if you’re going to relocate in Shanghai, don’t forget to visit this mall.

The restaurants in the mall are said to be extremely good. We didn’t have opportunity to test them, but several independent sources said that they are well worth their value (which is quite much in Shanghainese terms).

Plaza 66, 1266 Nanjing Xilu, Shanghai, China

I had relatively peaceful period in blogging after I renamed the wp-post-comments.php, but yesterday the first spammer updated his robot to snoop the new URL from the form, as I was predicting.

Fortunately all the spamming attempts so far have been feeble, going through the same old stuff and Spaminator has been able to delete all of them.

The situation still sucks and I really don’t want to waste my precious time to delete a bunch of comment spam emails every day. Maybe I’ve to figure out new counter-measures, once again. Or should I implement the monster that I designed earlier. Anyhow, all good pointers are really appreciated.